Experts say it’s sometimes tricky business to focus on the fluctuating street value of drugs smuggled by cartels, but authorities often rely on that measure to gauge success.
Task Force leader Capt. Mike Brem of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office called the $2 million haul “a drop in the bucket.”
“The stuff that’s coming over our border, we don’t catch a tenth of it,” Brem said.
Drugs have been streaming across the globe in vast quantities for decades, including to users in the U.S. Here are six of the world’s largest seizures:
$7 billion, 1989
A warehouse raid in Sylmar, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb, yielded 21 tons of cocaine linked to Mexican drug trafficker Rafael Munoz Talaveraan. The estimated value of the cocaine was $7 billion. Munoz was found dead in 1998 in Tijuana, Mexico, bound and shot in his Jeep.
$2.7 billion to $4 billion, 1991
Another of the world’s largest drug busts is considered to be a 1,080-pound heroin shipment to San Francisco from Myanmar, Laos and Thailand in 1991. The heroin, valued at $2.7 billion to $4 billion, was hidden in a cargo container among millions of plastic produce bags, reported the New York Times.
$1.5 billion, 2014
A whopping 10 million hits of ecstasy and other drugs were seized in what the Daily Mail reported to be Australian authorities’ second-largest bust ever. Value on the three tons of drugs shipped in furniture from Hamburg, Germany, was estimated at more than $1.5 billion.
$1 billion, 1984
Tipped off by the DEA, the Colombian government raided a jungle cocaine production lab operated by the Medellin cartel, whose boss was Pablo Escobar. It was a reported 14 tons of cocaine worth about $1 billion.
$500 million, 2010
A 2010 shootout between cartel members and Mexican police in Tijuana ended in the seizure of 115 tons of marijuana bound for the U.S. The confiscated pot weighed as much as 15 adult male African elephants or a Boeing 757 at maximum takeoff weight and had a street value of about a half billion dollars, according to a report in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
$20 million, 2010
The DEA and the San Diego Tunnel Task Force raided warehouses in Tijuana, Mexico and Otay Mesa, Calif., seized 30 tons of marijuana and shut down an elaborate 1,800-foot tunnel between the two, complete with a rails and drug sleds. The DEA estimated the haul at $20 million.
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